


creatures of habit

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Friends With Benefits, im illiterate idk whats happening here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 15:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11924076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: "This isn’t a big deal. We’re just sleeping together.” She should’ve caught then the revelry on his lips.





	creatures of habit

**Author's Note:**

> ok confession i havent slept in like 30 hours and i'm lowkey delirious rn, i was just writing this to put myself to sleep and it failed and im still awake. when will i die. anyway here u go if its incomprehensible lmk

creatures of habit

She has always been a lover of rituals. Repetitive patterns, tidy step-by-step plans that seep into instinct. Small routines – writing a few lines in her journal before bed, getting coffee with her mother on Sunday afternoons, watering her plants as she watches the news in the morning – become old friends, comforting and satisfying in their predictability. It probably explained in part why she had been able to remain so devoutly religious after all these years, after all the ignored and bloody prayers. Half of faith is simply showing up.

Her nights, too, are regimented and practiced. Wash her face, wipe off her make-up, toner, moisturize. Precise. She can see the relief, the quietest of triumphs, in her own eyes as she stares down her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Whatever she had fought against during the day is momentarily over. There is an _at last_. An _I’ve made it_. Everything that follows is known.

None of this is true now. Any sense of familiarity found in her nighttime routine disappears the moment Mulder, wearing a pair of faded Quantico sweatpants and a grey t-shirt, rests an easy hand on the bathroom door frame. He clears his throat. “You going to sleep?”

Scully brings her head up from the sink, reaching blindly for the washcloth to dry her face. She raises an eyebrow but doesn’t turn to face him, overly conscious of the black smudges around her eyes, remnants of her mascara. “Some of us actually live here.”

_Come on, Mulder_ , _take the hint_ , she thinks, a clumsy and embarrassing plea, but of course he doesn’t. His investigative method has always been to find an answer he already predetermined, twisting the facts into shape in his hands. He steps over the threshold into the bathroom. “It’s only 10:40.”

She’s sure she’s imagining the ellipsis in his voice, a by-product of her admittedly unfair irritation at his disruption, but she still glowers at him as she dabs a cotton ball in make-up remover. “Was there anything _else_ you wanted to do tonight?”

“No,” he says, in an almost whine, like he’s ten years old and has heard this spiel a thousand times. “Jeez. I’m just surprised.”

“Surprised.”

The skeptical lilt in her voice is enough of a welcome for Mulder to get comfortable. He sits down on the edge of her bathtub, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. It’s not dissimilar from kneeling in prayer. “I always pictured you as a night owl.”

"Eleven pm isn’t night?” Another cue for his exit that Mulder will undoubtedly ignore. Scully flicks the used cotton ball into the trash can by the vanity, turning to examine her now clean face in the mirror. Mulder’s presence in the reflection – at the bottom left, just visible from his shoulders up – makes it unexpectedly alien. It’s less of a mirror than it is Alice’s looking glass, a window into a _could be_ , a _possibly_. Something just ever so slightly enchanted. Scully lightly runs her finger around her eyes. On the other side, Alice does the same.

She turns to face him, crossing her arms. Her grip is too tight and her fingernails are too long. She can feel them through her t-shirt, gingerly carving half-moons on her ribs. “Why did you think I was a night person?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says noncommittedly. The hair on his arms is standing on end and it occurs to her, for the first time, that her apartment bathroom is absolutely freezing. Until this moment it had been a given, an indistinct part of well-known sensations. Now it’s almost overpowering. She can feel the chill in her teeth. “You always picked up the phone, whenever I called, regardless of time. One am, two am. Three. I guess I always assumed you stay up, like me.”

“No, I never stay up past midnight. I just wake up for you.”

These are dangerous words they’re speaking. _Regardless, always pictured, for you_. Far outside her routine, and far, far outside the cleanly cut rules they set last month, after she woke up with her hand brushing his shoulder, after she’d been unable to ignore the imminence of that particular mistake’s reoccurrence. “No sleepovers,” she’d said in March, flanked on both sides by filing cabinets. “And we keep it professional at work.”

“Of course, of course” he had said. “If it becomes a problem, if we get too, I don’t know, attached? We’ll end it. This isn’t a big deal. We’re just sleeping together.” She should’ve caught then the revelry on his lips.

But it had been fine, for a while. It really had. A new routine had been constructed, one clandestine and exciting and most importantly, unconnected to any other aspect of her life. An overly composed phone call, a bottle of red wine, her apartment. A whispered good night.  All of her other routines stayed completely in tact.

Until now. In her apartment bathroom, at 10:40 pm, the discrete elements had begun to interact. She suspects that’s why this moment feels so intimate. It’s one thing to sleep with someone. It’s an entirely different thing to let them see the afterwards.

She lets out a sigh, unsure of how to begin. “Mulder… we’re breaking rules.”

“We aren’t.” His answer is too quick. He was prepared. “This isn’t staying over.”

Maybe not. But it was never the actual practice of staying over she was wary of. It was always this. Mulder’s bare feet on the tile floor and her wiped away make-up and the muffled city humming from outside the window. “Maybe. It feels like it, though.”

For a moment, she thinks he might push her on it, but, in a rare moment of fleeting grace, he simply nods. He stands up, heads for the door, pauses in the threshold. Turns around. “You’re not – are we ending this?”

If she had any sense at all, she would say yes. She privately knows that her course correction tonight is only momentary. Sooner or later, she will end up catching the first of Saturday morning through his blinds, end up with his fingers along her spine in their office. End up with her heat bruised and stinking of gunpowder, with his name bloodied in her throat.

But Scully has always a lover of rituals. She shakes her head.


End file.
